Re: WCIT outcome?
ITU was founded previously as the International Telegraph Union before AG Bell's phone was patented, no doubt the evolution of telecommunications and the Internet puts ITU with its current behavior in the path of becoming obsolete and extinct, but you can't discount many positive contributions particularly from the standards section. As the multistakeholder model and its associated processes, which is far from perfect, continues to evolve, ITU must be part of the evolution. The issue is that as an organization they must accommodate and realize that now they are part of it and not it anymore. There is also a big confusion and still lack of a clear consensus on what Internet governance means or entitles, and many take it as governing the Internet, hence governments want a piece of the action, and the constant and many times intended perception that the Internet is controlled by the USG and its development and evolution is US centric, which I believe at IETF we know since long time ago is not true. But many countries, and as you well say those where there was or still is a single telecom operator and controlled by government, see it that way. About the countries that signed, not many but most did it with reservations, and those that didn't sign probably represent 2/3 or more of the telecom market/industry. An interesting observation after spending countless hours following the meeting, some of the countries that were pushing the discussion for a reference to the universal declaration of human rights are the ones who don't care much about them, particularly in respect to women, and on the other hand others complaining about discrimination and restricted access to the Internet are the ones currently filtering on the big pipes and have the Internet as the first thing on their list to shutdown during internal turmoil. The same forces that pushed at WCIT will keep doing the same thing on other international fora to insist with their Internet governance agenda, the ITRs will become effective in Jan 2015, two years, which on Internet time is an eternity, and it will be only valid if those countries that signed ratify the treaty. Meanwhile packets keep flowing, faster, bigger and with more destinations, not bad for a packet switching network that was not supposed to work. (During WCIT I was wondering, could you imagine doing the webcast via X.25? ) I agree that it is not clear what the outcome of WCIT12 was, but something that is clear is that ITU needs to evolve, or as Vint characterized them, the dinosaurs will become extinct. Cheers, Happy Holidays and great start for 2013 Jorge http://about.me/jamodio On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 12:26 AM, Phillip Hallam-Baker hal...@gmail.comwrote: We seem to have missed a discussion on the outcome of the Dubai WCIT conference, or rather the lack of one. The end result was a treaty that 54 countries refused to sign. The non-signatories being the major developed economies including UK, US, Japan, Germany, Canada. Many of the signatories have signed with reservations. Back at the dawn of the computer industry, IBM was a very late entrant but it quickly came to dominate the industry by building on the commercial base it had established in punchcard tabulator machines. There was a real risk that ITU might have managed to pull off something similar by convincing governments that there needed to be a global regulatory body for communications and that the ITU should be that body. Instead they seem to have pulled off the equivalent of OS/@ and microchannel architecture which were the marketing moves that were intended to allow IBM to consolidate its hold on the PC industry but instead lead to the rise of the Windows and the EISA bus clones. It now seems reasonably clear that the ITU was an accident of history that resulted from a particular set of economic and technical limitations. The ITU was founded when each country had exactly one telephone company and almost all were government controlled. One country one vote was an acceptable approach in those days because there was only one telephone company per country. The telephone companies were the only stakeholders needed to implement a proposal. The old telephone system is fading away. It is becoming an Internet application just as the pocket calculator has become a desktop application. And as it passes, the institutions it founded are looking for new roles. There is no particular reason that this must happen. The stakeholders in the Internet don't even align to countries. My own employer is relatively small but was founded in the UK, moved its headquarters to the US and has operations in a dozen more countries and many times that number of affiliates. The same is even more true of the likes of Google, Cisco, Apple, IBM, Microsoft etc. A standards process is a two way negotiation. There are things that I want other people to implement in their products and there are things that they want me
Re: WCIT outcome?
Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: The stakeholders in the Internet don't even align to countries. My own employer is relatively small but was founded in the UK, moved its headquarters to the US and has operations in a dozen more countries and many times that number of affiliates. The same is even more true of the likes of Google, Cisco, Apple, IBM, Microsoft etc. You miss the most important stakeholders, the end users aligning to countries. Masataka Ohta PS Of course, countries acting as representatives for telephone companies are just as bad as countries acing as representatives for ISPs.
travel guide for the next IETF...
Going Beyond Disney in Orlando Quick, name five reasons to go to Orlando. Here are mine: Puerto Rican delicacies, alternative cinema, craft beer, African-American history and psychic readings... http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/going-beyond-disney-in-orlando/?nl=travelemc=edit_tl_20121229 d/ -- Dave Crocker Brandenburg InternetWorking bbiw.net
Re: travel guide for the next IETF...
City of Celebration - it's more than just a movie set. Freakiest place on earth. On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 7:18 AM, Dave Crocker d...@dcrocker.net wrote: Going Beyond Disney in Orlando Quick, name five reasons to go to Orlando. Here are mine: Puerto Rican delicacies, alternative cinema, craft beer, African-American history and psychic readings... http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/going-beyond-disney-in-orlando/?nl=travelemc=edit_tl_20121229 d/ -- Dave Crocker Brandenburg InternetWorking bbiw.net
Re: travel guide for the next IETF...
On 12/29/2012 7:29 AM, Greg Shepherd wrote: Freakiest place on earth. uh oh. now you've invited a debate... d/ -- Dave Crocker Brandenburg InternetWorking bbiw.net
Re: WCIT outcome?
On Sat, Dec 29, 2012 at 5:43 AM, Jorge Amodio jmamo...@gmail.com wrote: ITU was founded previously as the International Telegraph Union before AG Bell's phone was patented, no doubt the evolution of telecommunications and the Internet puts ITU with its current behavior in the path of becoming obsolete and extinct, but you can't discount many positive contributions particularly from the standards section. The original purpose was to stop consumers from reducing their telegraph bills by adopting codes. As the multistakeholder model and its associated processes, which is far from perfect, continues to evolve, ITU must be part of the evolution. The issue is that as an organization they must accommodate and realize that now they are part of it and not it anymore. ITU must change if it is to survive. But it was merely a means to an end. There is no reason that the ITU 'must' be kept in existence for its own sake. Tim Berners-Lee has on numerous W3C AC meetings reminded people about the X-Windows consortium that did its job and then shut down. There is also a big confusion and still lack of a clear consensus on what Internet governance means or entitles, and many take it as governing the Internet, hence governments want a piece of the action, and the constant and many times intended perception that the Internet is controlled by the USG and its development and evolution is US centric, which I believe at IETF we know since long time ago is not true. But many countries, and as you well say those where there was or still is a single telecom operator and controlled by government, see it that way. Many parts of the world do not understand the difference between a standard and a regulation or law. Which is why they see control points that don't worry us. I do not see a problem with the US control of the IPv6 address supply because I know that it is very very easy to defeat that control. ICANN is a US corporation and the US government can obviously pass laws that prevent ICANN/IANA from releasing address blocks that would reach certain countries no matter what Crocker et. al. say to the contrary. But absent a deployed BGP security infrastructure, that has no effect since the rest of the planet is not going to observe a US embargo. I can see that and most IETF-ers can see that. But the diplomats representing Russia and China cannot apparently. Which is probably not surprising given the type of education their upper classes (sorry children of party bosses) receive. About the countries that signed, not many but most did it with reservations, and those that didn't sign probably represent 2/3 or more of the telecom market/industry. An interesting observation after spending countless hours following the meeting, some of the countries that were pushing the discussion for a reference to the universal declaration of human rights are the ones who don't care much about them, particularly in respect to women, and on the other hand others complaining about discrimination and restricted access to the Internet are the ones currently filtering on the big pipes and have the Internet as the first thing on their list to shutdown during internal turmoil. Funny thing about treaties is that the governments that signed the UDHR with great cynicism sixty years ago started to actually discuss it a generation later. Now two generations on it is what the entire political class has grown up with and it is accepted as something the country has committed to. A similar thing happened with the first ban on chemical weapons which actually preceded the first large scale use in WWI. But in the aftermath the victors realized that breaking the ban could be used as the basis for a war crimes prosecution. Almost a century later the ban is pretty effective. The UK is currently hearing a case in the high court arising from the use of torture in Kenya. Pinochet was put on trial for his crimes in the end. The same forces that pushed at WCIT will keep doing the same thing on other international fora to insist with their Internet governance agenda, the ITRs will become effective in Jan 2015, two years, which on Internet time is an eternity, and it will be only valid if those countries that signed ratify the treaty. Meanwhile packets keep flowing, faster, bigger and with more destinations, not bad for a packet switching network that was not supposed to work. (During WCIT I was wondering, could you imagine doing the webcast via X.25? ) Two years may be longer than some of the unstable regimes have left. I can't see Syria holding out that long and nor it appears can Russia. The next dominoes in line are the ex-Soviet republics round the Caspian sea where having the opposition boiled alive is still considered an acceptable means of control. I agree that it is not clear what the outcome of WCIT12 was, but something that is clear is that ITU needs to evolve, or as Vint characterized them, the dinosaurs
Re: travel guide for the next IETF...
On Dec 29, 2012, at 10:18 AM, Dave Crocker d...@dcrocker.net wrote: Going Beyond Disney in Orlando Quick, name five reasons to go to Orlando. Here are mine: Puerto Rican delicacies, alternative cinema, craft beer, African-American history and psychic readings... http://frugaltraveler.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/going-beyond-disney-in-orlando/?nl=travelemc=edit_tl_20121229 During IETF '43, the Mars Climate Orbiter was launched; I wasn't the only one who headed east from Orlando on Friday... Ironically, it was lost due to what could be called an error in a protocol implementation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter --Steve Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
Re: WCIT outcome?
On 29 dec 2012, at 19:19, Phillip Hallam-Baker hal...@gmail.com wrote: ITU must change if it is to survive. But it was merely a means to an end. There is no reason that the ITU 'must' be kept in existence for its own sake. Tim Berners-Lee has on numerous W3C AC meetings reminded people about the X-Windows consortium that did its job and then shut down. There are, IMHO, two major differences between the old world and the new world: In the new world, there are many different SDOs that are, in combination, bringing whatever standards are needed to the table. In the old world, there was only one. In the new world, governance is no longer by decree, by legislation or similar. In the new world we use the word collaboration, and that is done via policy development processes that are multi stakeholder and bottom up. Like in the RIRs (for IP addresses etc), like in ICANN (for domain names) or locally for the various (successful) ccTLDs that are out there. And of course in the various industry consortia that bring so many valuable specifications to the table. This is, I claim, ratified in the UN context in the outcome we call The Tunis Agenda and it has come back over and over again. In various formats, using slightly different wordings, but always the same theme. Sometimes, I do though think also IETF participants should think a bit more about what the basic principles are for them. Why they fight for their views. What could make them give up. What the values are that they think are essential. That they are ready to really fight for. Patrik Fältström Chair of ICANN SSAC Former member of IESG, IAB etc and delegate of the Swedish Delegation at WCIT-12
Re: WCIT outcome?
At 10:19 29-12-2012, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: ICANN is a US corporation and the US government can obviously pass laws that prevent ICANN/IANA from releasing address blocks that would reach certain countries no matter what Crocker et. al. say to the contrary. But absent a deployed BGP security :-) At 14:46 29-12-2012, Patrik Fältström wrote: In the new world, governance is no longer by decree, by legislation or similar. In the new world we use the word collaboration, and that is done via policy development processes that are multi stakeholder and bottom up. Like in the RIRs (for IP addresses What people say and what they actually do or mean is often a very different matter. An individual may have principles (or beliefs). A stakeholder has interests. There was an individual who mentioned on an IETF mailing list that he/she disagreed with his/her company's stance. It's unlikely that a stakeholder would say that. The collaboration is less about process and more about culture. In some parts of the new world governance is still by legislation, etc. That could be attributed to cultural or other factors. The WCIT outcome might be highlighting the fracture. Regards, -sm
